Transbraxton Studies for solo instruments
The Transbraxton Studies for solo instruments are a series of portrait studies that utilize solo saxophone improvisations by Anthony Braxton. Transbraxton Study I is written for solo violin and utilises the first 9 minutes of the piece ‘To Composer John Cage’ (8F) from the album For Alto (1968). Above is a performance by Graham Jennings at Kings Place March 2010
Transbraxton Study II is written for bass clarinet and is based on the piece 8G from the album News From the 70’s (1972).
Transbraxton Study III for Ganassi recorder is based on the piece 106J (pointillistic) from the album 19 (Solo) Compositions, (1988).
Rather than being literal representations of the original, these works seek to reformalize and extend the originals that have been improvised through various compositional processes. The pitch material has been left in tact whilst the timbral and rhythmic ideas have been manipulated and transformed through spacial notation and considerations pertaining to the intrinsic colours and sound worlds of these different instruments.
“……a musician requires a first type of refrain, a territorial or assemblage refrain, in order to transform it from within, deterritorialize it, producing a refrain of the second type as the final end of music: the cosmic refrain of a sound machine.” (Deleuze & Guattari 385)
Gilles Deleuze & Felix Guattari in their work A Thousand Plateaus have formed the conceptual framework of this current project and the Transbraxton Studies continue a process that I have been engaged with that involves transforming freely improvised music into notated solo and chamber works. In this context the initial Braxton improvisations represent these first type of refrains – self contained assemblages of phrases, syntax and language. These improvisations are then transformed through the act of composition, taken out of their original contexts and ‘deterritorialized’ into a second type of refrain. In notating and representing the music as an object or a fixed point in the form of a score the intention is to move the first type of refrain into the second type or what D&G describe as a ‘sound machine’, a mechanism, a score that has a life of its own (now separate from the first type) and is open to be repeated and interpreted by subsequent performances by different players.
“It is the extremely profound labor dedicated to the first type of the refrain that creates the second type” (D&G 386) and it is with admiration and respect that these pieces have been formulated from the previous work by Anthony Braxton with his generous approval.
Deleuze, G., and Guattari, F. A Thousand Plateaus. London: Continuum, 2004.
